“I feel very lucky that so far we’ve managed to do a lot of things exactly at the right moment, exactly at the right time with the right combination of things,” says Systrom. “As much as entrepreneurs want to take credit for each and every little decision and say it made complete sense at the time, I promise you a lot of it is luck.”

Systrom had worked at Google when he launched his company less than two years ago.

Systrom says the company had about two dozen employees, but it’s time to grow.

So what does the future of Instagram look like?

He says, “Imagine a service that collects all of the visual data that gets produced all around the world, so that you can tune in to any place on earth and see exactly what is happening.”

The iPhone Instagram app has been downloaded more than 30 million times.